Resurgence of hope
by Lyrium eidolon
Summary: Sequel to 'Not of either world'. After a revelation that he can do something, a now-inquisitive life has returned to help save the galaxy at large, while trying to understand its very nature and that of its inhabitants. But can they truly be saved?
1. Chapter 1: Return to the Galaxy: part 1

**Author's note:** After much struggle, I present to you the first installment of the sequel to Not of Either World.

**Disclaimer: **The following is a non-profit fan-based piece of fiction. Mass Effect is owned by BioWare and Final Fantasy by Square Enix.

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Chapter 1: Return to the Galaxy part 1: Hope's hunt

A year ago, one probably wouldn't believe the story of Hope Estheim, survivor of Eden Prime, technological prodigy, explorer of the hidden worlds of Gran Pulse and Cocoon. It was by pure accident that he and the geth Legion ended up on the broken, hollow world of Cocoon, and it seemed like such an ironic twist of fate that they were able to aid people who were 'cursed' into servitude to prevent the return of the Reapers through a Mass Relay hidden inside.

Now, one year onward from that, Legion and Hope were continuing to assist the geth collective. Hope, with the help of the geth, managed to greatly improve his tech-scan program to not only use the comm. buoys to extend the range, but also refine it to detect Reaper technology. With this, and a lot of persistence, the geth had managed to weed out many groups of heretics posing a threat among them. One such incidence of Reaper technology was found in the Omega space station in the Terminus Systems.

Legion had to attend to other matters for the geth, so once their home-made shuttle arrived at Omega, Hope disembarked, wheeling a large crate off the ship

"A kid, disembarking off a vessel in Omega?" a batarian in the vicinity scoffed. "…and a rich-looking one at that. Hand over everything you have."

"This is the only thing valuable that I have," Hope spoke, indicating the crate that he was wheeling behind him.

"Interesting. I think Aria will like this. Now scram!"

Hope instead waited until the batarian was out of sight, then quietly followed him. It looked like he was taking his package to a club called Afterlife. Suspecting that the thug was part of a larger underworld, he did a quick scan to intercept any communications, and it immediately bore fruit.

"Be more specific, Migol. You say you got it off a kid?" a female voice, most likely this 'Aria', spoke

"Yes, he was carrying it by himself. It's rather strange to have to wheel it along the ground," the batarian replied

"Check it. See if there's anything valuable inside. If it came from a kid, it's most likely just a case of toys, and I don't like my men bringing me children's mini Kodiak shuttles and asari dolls and calling it 'swag'."

"Fine."

Hope pressed another button on his omni-tool, while still hiding in the pathway to the shuttle, and his stolen crate exploded violently in an expanding fireball, blasting through the open entrance and reducing the numerous criminal scum around the entrance to little more than ash. He had little time: he couldn't afford to get bogged down by the criminals of Afterlife. He had to find the Reaper technology and get off the station as soon as possible.

"Attention, people of Omega," a PA announcement sounded. "We have someone who is attempting to fuck with Aria. If you see a rich brat leaving the main docking area, bring him to Afterlife for 're-education'. Oh, and take guns with you."

So it was coming to this? A scan from the omni-tool of Omega revealed the Reaper agents in the area known as the Gozu district. He could maybe raise an alarm there, but he needed to see what was happening. Some more frantic tapping on his omni-tool showed a salarian registered as a scientist of the Special Tasks Group, a major amount of mercenaries registered with the Blue Suns gang, a group of vorcha that was triggering a reading on his Tech-scanner… wait, vorcha? Since when were they technologically capable enough to produce something other than guns?

Refining his remote scan, he found that the technology of that group of vorcha was actually of Reaper origin, along with the fact that it was some form of airborne virus… that had just been released. Hope battered at the keys on his omni-tool, taking the only course of action left, and a few seconds later, a quarantine alarm was triggered for the Gozu District, with many entrances sealing and advanced air-vent filters activating. Maker willing, that salarian Special Tasks Grunt would take the warning and work with it before it was too late. With that done, Hope ran back to his shuttle just as batarians, turians and humans caught sight of him, and before they could catch up, the shuttle doors were closed and the airlock releasing. Those unfortunate enough to have just made it to the shuttle's hull were blasted into space and left to die, the words of "Open up, you little brat!" being the last ones they ever spoke.

As he retreated to the Mass Relay, Hope took a note: one of several that he had taken since he left Cocoon a year ago. Since those five other l'Cie accepted him for who he was, he began thinking that maybe his views of the organic races should be revised. However:

"Organics are oppressive" he typed into the omni-tool. "Those at a higher position on the hierarchy command their underlings for their own gain. Relevant Data Point: Omega space station; leader, 'Aria', with effective use of thugs to enforce morally illegitimate rule."

A few minutes after he was done taking his note, a data stream registered on his ship mentioning that a human colony had disappeared, the latest in a long line of many. The colony was a Terminus Systems colony on the planet Rozzaria, in a semi-secluded area of space. This was happening far too many times to be coincidence, and with too disturbing a modus operandi to ignore, so he redirected his shuttle to link to the correct destination Mass Relay.

A second note he typed in just before he traveled through the Relay: "Bomb Surprise effective in eliciting response from criminal gangs."


	2. Chapter 2: Return to the Galaxy: part 2

Chapter 2: Return to the Galaxy part 2: Deserted desert colony

Hope's shuttle was traveling through space, through Mass Relays, to come towards a pale yellow planet. The shuttle, entering the atmosphere, descended to the location of a series of buildings. Bringing up a few visuals on holographic screens, the shuttle's silver-haired occupant, Hope, could see that the planet was a golden yellow desert, with the sands forming wave-like patterns as the wind blew on it, with a bright yellow mid-afternoon sky. All of the colony buildings seemed to cluster around one central point: a large body of water, an oasis in the desert, while eight 'petals' adjoined to the oasis and played host to other buildings. Spotting another oasis to the cardinal northeast, Hope saw it playing host to various crop farms.

Hope maneuvered the shuttle into position above the edge of the colony and activated a tech scanner he had created and fitted. After this, out of curiosity, he decided to look into the history of this planet. Apparently, the desert conditions first turned away human settlers as it had previously done to hopeful asari, salarians, volus and especially hanar, due in large part to the supposed unsustainability of farming, and (a major problem for the hanar) the lack of surface moisture contributing to a belief that it would be too hot a climate.

However, with this planet being the same distance away from the sun as Mars was from the Sol star, temperatures were cool despite the shortage of surface water. The many oases, with small amounts of water each, had made growth of plants possible and ensured that there was a suitable amount of surface water despite lack of an ocean or the vast reaches of the desert.

After a long period of debate and a large number of bribes to the right people, the Systems Alliance founded a colony surrounding one of the larger oases. The splendid sights provided, especially during the evenings and sunrise, drew a number of people to the colony, but the real reason it thrived was because a few large criminal syndicates, most notably the Blue Suns and Eclipse mercenary gangs, used it as a pit-stop during their trips to other parts of the Terminus Systems. Since it was out of the way of the main mass relays used for transit around the Terminus, the ships almost never saw combat. Even when rival gangs were docking, if there was any fighting, their vessel was impounded and recycled into base materials for sale to the highest bidder. Serving all comers, just as long as they paid, Rozzaria soon had a reputation attached to the colony that, in effect, stated "As long as you have creds, we don't give a damn who you are."

This Black Market World, as the Alliance called it, was primarily human and was a large point of interest for the Eclipse and Blue Suns to hire their human hands. Landing at the colony shipyards on one 'petal', the reality seemed to contradict what Hope had just read on the logs: there wasn't anybody around. Even the cliché of criminals waiting in ambush to rob him of his valuables seemed implausible as not only was he never hailed, but it was such a small, unremarkable shuttle that there would be no reason to try and stage an ambush. What he saw of the colony from the air beforehand, now that he thought of it, was equally scary: the whole thing was devoid of people.

Walking away from the landing zone, he came across a sign saying 'Desert Eagle' and ran into the building holding the sign. It was empty here as well, and there were still a fair number of guns on the shelf and a sales kiosk was barely operational… so the place was a gun shop. Maybe there was something on the computer? Walking up to where that computer was behind the counter, Hope was startled to find that it was offline, and it was even more surprising that it wasn't reactivating despite him repeatedly pressing the button. Suspecting something, he grabbed and threw a nearby display pistol through the open door… with it just flying through the air and hitting the wall of the building opposite it. If the anti-shoplifting countermeasures didn't trigger, then it must have meant that the power was offline for the building.

Nearby was a building which advertised 'Bots Away!' so maybe that would hold some more clues. As he ran inside, he saw inactive security mechs in display cases, mainly for the LOKI and YMIR varieties. Here as well, the power was inactive. Something was off here, so he activated a radar sweep with his tech-scan on his omni-tool to scan a local area. In the meantime, he saw that there were one or two Power Cell cases behind the door-side counter, and a large metal door on the opposite side of the room, albeit closed. Knowing mech dealers, they'd have to have some form of storage floor or loading bay to stash all their mechs. The building was rather large, and the shop area was miniscule in comparison, so Hope took the power cells to the large metal door at the opposite end of the room and wired them up to the door's control panel.

His tech-scan finished its sweep then, and the only active blips of technology were his ship, his omni-tool and one signature close by, behind the metal doors. When Hope finished with his hard-wiring, the door panel didn't even light up, so the power cells might have been dead. There was nothing for it; Hope removed one of the wires from a cell, retrieved a miniature olden-day lightning rod, wedged it into his impromptu circuit and fired a bolt of lightning from his omni-tool. While the bolt did hit the rod and successfully light up the control panel for the door, the light died out within seconds.

"Okay, this will be risky…" Hope muttered to himself, "Omni-Tool Lightning Blaster. Active Virtual Arc Projectors: set to max of 5. Electrical targeting: Concave. I hope this doesn't blow the wires. Custom firing: Sustained duration: ten seconds"

With his right hand hovering over his omni-tool hand, which was pointed at the lightning rod, he breathed in, knowing that once he started, he would only have seconds: minutes if he was lucky.

He pressed the button on his omni-tool, whereupon five holographic panels directly in front of the tool lit up and surged bolts of electricity towards the rod. The panel lit up in a second, but he couldn't wait; he pressed the 'Open' option and watched how the doors slightly creaked apart; the panel's green light darkening and threatening to thwart his last-ditch effort. The lightning continued streaming into the circuit, the doors slowly slid apart, but then his omni-tool stopped. The ten-second duration had expired, and the door was just wide enough that he could walk through.

"Who's there? Stay the fuck out of here if you know what's good for you!" a female voice yelled. Hope primed his shields, and pressed a button on his omni-tool which caused it to shoot a beam of light into the darkened room.

"Hello?" he called into the darkness. However, he readied his boomerang just in case…

"Stay the hell out, kid! They'll find us! There's no goddamn way I'm dying today!"

"Who are 'they'? For that matter, who are you?"

"Just get the hell out! Now that you've got the door open, they'll be swarming in here any minute!"

"There's nobody here. It is just the two of us!"

"Don't get any ideas. Just because we're stranded here doesn't mean you have a hope in hell of scoring with me!"

Hope was getting tired of shouting into the pitch black, so he threw his boomerang out. A few seconds later, there was an explosion of electricity further back towards the other wall of the room, along with a 'What the hell?!', red lights lighting up and dull feminine voices droning "Hostiles detected". Another explosion of electricity sparked more mechs activating, and as the boomerang struck for a third, fourth, fifth and finally sixth time, a large portion of red lights and female voices were haunting the darkened room.

Catching the boomerang that had returned to him by then, he fled the room and primed his Lightning Blast function again. A couple seconds later, an asari in yellow armor flew through the crack and fired a heavy pistol into the darkness, a flurry of retaliation shots hitting the floor around her. Hope fired his lightning into the rod, and yelled at the asari to toggle the door panel to close. Surprisingly, the asari complied, causing the doors to slide towards each other, but the red lights were growing and more shots were being fired. It was so close, but Hope and the asari could make out the face of a LOKI mech as its arms got crushed in the now sealed back room.

"Way to fucking go, now you've exposed the both of us to the enemy," the asari grumbled, turning to face her new companion and subsequently exposing the Eclipse insignia on her armor.

"I've been here for at least half an hour and I haven't seen anything, miss…" Hope retorted.

"Alicia, if you have to know. So you've got transport off this world then?"

"It is in orbit. I'm Hope, by the way,"

"Fantastic," Alicia cheered, drawing a shotgun. "Summon it!"

"I can't do that,"

"Can you take several plasma pellets to the chest? Summon it!"

"No, I can't do that because I need the comm. relay to bring it down, and power seems to be offline everywhere. Where can I find this colony's generators?"

"Goddess, what a mess. Fine, there are eight generators, each underneath one of the colony's subsections around the oasis. They shut down when this place was attacked, but you should be able to manually reactivate them, provided we aren't set upon by those things."

"What things, Alicia?"

"What do you mean 'what things'? Those fucking bug swarms that ravaged the colony. The only reason I'm still here was 'cause I shut those storage bay doors before any of them got in. It's unlikely anyone escaped though, yellow beams were blasting ships straight into the sand. The next thing I know is I'm fucking trapped in that bay with them clawing outside. Guess I should be thankful those were blast doors designed to contain rocket drones and heavies."

"That thing about the bug swarms and yellow beams is the first useful thing you've said to me so far about the disappearance, though I admit I forgot to ask. Can you take me to these generators?"

"Fine, but as soon as they're up, you're calling the ship."

Alicia, from there, led Hope to a building in the exact center of that particular section of the colony, although it wasn't too far from the 'Bots Away!' store and it was fairly noticeable. Once inside, they made their way to the actual reactor, and it was just a matter of re-engaging the systems via the controls, which was fairly easy.

Hope also discovered that, from the reactor, he could basically collect data from every building in that particular subsection of the colony, so he inserted a worm to relay data to his omni-tool, then proceeded to reprogram seven nearby inactive LOKI mechs to power up the seven other reactors. As he finished sending them off, he discovered a gun barrel pressed against his head.

"You should have been able to access the comm. system, so what is taking you so long to call the ship?" Alicia hissed.

"It's on its way. I'll take you to it," Hope sighed. This was another thing he would have to note when he got back. When he brought Alicia to his ship and opened its doors, she shoved him to the ground and ran aboard.

"Enjoy the desert, rich boy!"

However, when she tried to press the various buttons to make it take off, nothing happened. No matter what she tried, nothing worked, and she seemed to get so fed up with the whole thing that she pulled her shotgun on Hope, demanding that he 'stop fucking with her'.

"The joke is on you, because I don't really have a habit of allowing organic cargo onto the shuttle," Hope laughed.

"Organic cargo? You would call an asari commando 'organic cargo'?!"

"You're right; the term 'organic waste' suits you better, considering that you're with Eclipse."

"You're pretty mouthy for a kid!" Alicia roared, taking a stance as if she were about to grip something, her body lighting up with a blue light, and lighting up even further with bolts of electricity when lightning sprang from Hope's omni-tool. Although undergoing a significant amount of electrical torture as the lightning drained her barrier, she managed to fire off her shotgun in his direction, but with the blasts being stopped by his own shields right there.

"Little secret; geth shielding," Hope boasted as she fell unconscious, noting in his log when he got aboard and after stashing the asari in a secure container labeled 'Hazardous material' that "Organics are spoiled. They feel entitled to living with power, and when their power is taken away, they try to get it back for themselves and only themselves. Relevant data-point: Eclipse asari Alicia on Terminus world Rozzaria, with use of weapons, titles and biotics to coerce and intimidate."


End file.
